The other boroughs look good, too, especially Brooklyn with its chessboard of rubicund houses, projects and stoops. As for Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, they have their charms, but mostly serve to amplify the whole, and to highlight the magnificence of Manhattan—an island New Yorkers refer to simply as ‘the city’.
Driving into it for the first time is like entering a theme park, a playground of excess and deprivation that, like an old rollercoaster, can only be conquered in straight lines (up, down or across, with the occasional hard-stop).
Driving into it for the first time is like entering a theme park, a playground of excess and deprivation
I first visited there in 2001, about two weeks after 9/11, when all I wanted to do, aged 10, was ascend its tallest buildings, much to the bemusement of the police officers guarding their entrances.
It was only later that my interest moved from the tops of the towers to the street below. As a teenager, fed on a diet of New York movies and music, my imagination gambolled up and down the block. When Mad Men came out, I devoured it four times over.
The show’s creators did a great job of recreating the glamour of the city in the Sixties. The interiors were especially impressive. But then they had to be, because Mad Men was shot in LA. Though I loved the show, since New York is such an exteriors kinda town, this is, ultimately, a shame.
When I trawl through Tumblr pages with names like ‘NYCNostalgia’ or explore Time magazine’s archives (which I do embarrassingly often), I’m not looking for photos of interiors. I’m looking for shots of those long, wide-open avenues, of dilapidated brownstones, skyscrapers and neon lights, of James Brown jumping high into the sky outside the Apollo.
I’m looking for New York in the 1970s, when the city’s underbelly and avant-garde came together to dance in the gutter. When its mad, bad and dangerous street life created a perpetual circus of the night. I’m sure many would argue that it takes a privileged kind of cognitive dissonance to pine for a time of poverty and violence. Well, yes, it does. And I’m aware of the irony but this doesn’t mean I can stop the fetishisation taking place inside my head.
I’m looking for New York in the 1970s, when the city’s underbelly and avant-garde came together to dance in the gutter
I need only listen to Lou Reed, or read Lou Reed, or indeed James Wolcott’s memoir, Lucking Out—which contains the immortal lines: “How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell”—to think well, heck, surely the dirt and grime and stomach aches and pains were all worth it for the sheer vitality of the place?
You can read the books, listen to the music, watch movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy, but still want for more. The problem is, since there’s only a finite supply of contemporary work, you must rely on retrospective portrayals for your fix. These can often fall way short of the mark: Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down, I’m looking at you.
You can read the books, listen to the music, watch movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy, but still want for more. The problem is… you must rely on retrospective portrayals for your fix
So, it was with interest piqued when I learned that David Simon was making a show about Times Square in the 70s, The Deuce. If the TV serial boxset is to the 21st century what the novel was to the 19th, then Simon is its Dickens. His seminal series, The Wire, looked at the poison of corruption in Baltimore and how it seeped both upwards and downwards, between the street corners and the upper echelons of city hall.
While it was ostensibly about the gangs, police, dockworkers or press, what it was really about was people. Simon could use the story of a 14-year-old crack dealer to tell us more about the failings of the American Dream than many set texts. He possesses a great novelist’s understanding of the forces of history as well as the attention to detail required to form a nuanced response to them.
In an interview with the New Yorker, he said, “I’m the kind of person who, when I’m writing, cares above all about whether the people I’m writing about will recognise themselves.” Which is exactly what I want to hear from someone attempting to recreate my beloved 1970s Manhattan.
No backlot in Studio City for Simon, for The Deuce he requisitioned (or probably rented) an entire block in Washington Heights so that he could recreate old Times Square in painstaking detail. Combined with the writing, the acting and the soundtrack, the effect is of a gesamtkunstwerk, a multi-sensory cityscape which is probably the closest I’ll ever come to the real thing.
I’d offer a precis of the show, which has just concluded its final season, but I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. What I will say is that by chronicling the rise of pornography and rapid gentrification of the world’s cultural capital, it allows a better understanding of how these two things have come to dominate our time. The answer, as you may have guessed, is mostly down to money.
The fact New York became so appealing that venality tore it asunder might even in a perverse way enhance its 70s mystique. Ephemerality is, after all, rather alluring. Manhattan was Ground Zero for the kind of property speculation that has homogenised whole western cities. One need only look at how the current American president made his name to see where that kind of thing gets us.
The fact New York became so appealing that venality tore it asunder might even in a perverse way enhance its 70s mystique
Everyone with an interest in the particular has a favourite time or place in history they’d most like to have experienced. Mine’s 1970s Manhattan and, if I can’t find some strung out mad professor to take me there, I’ll have to make do with my own escapism. In this regard, The Deuce is very much appreciated.
